Company founders

• Ivo Šmelhaus

  

  Ivo started in the field of science and research and subsequently gained experience in the area of strategic business. He established a Czech company providing consultancy and training services with unique expertise. Later he launched customer service and commercial training centres in the university; he developed training, documentation and support integration system based on his own concepts.

  In addition to the technology that he has studied, he has also learnt a lot about telecommunications, strategic business, management and IT (Windows, Linux, Groupware, DMS, and LMS). However he has always been interested more in the user than in the technical solution itself. His effort to understand the things in the context (added value creation in training business, economic attitude to the investments into knowledge, optimisation of various knowledge sources) drove him to knowledge management long time ago. Therefore he has decided to further build on it through his business activities.

• Miroslav Škoda

  

  During his 20-year banking career Miroslav rose from clerical to the top managerial positions in Citigroup and CSOB. Over these years, while he has learnt a lot about banking business, technologies, auditing activities, process management, risk management, call centre development and management, the launch and management of central processing centres active in a dozens countries, most importantly he has learnt and understood the fact that knowledge is the most valuable asset of an individual and especially of a company. As a result the proper management of such assets is a precondition for its growth and security. Knowledge management is particularly significant in an environment increasingly dominated by international multicultural companies, where the ability to communicate and share knowledge is of utmost importance.

  Understanding this basic principle enabled him to implement more simple and effective processes while maximizing the use of all relevant and easily accessible information & all relevant personnel at the right time and the right place. His methods were pioneering or even revolutionary in many ways, the final results and the fact that they are still being used and developed proves their worth. For these reasons he has decided to start his business on foundation of knowledge-management principles.

Both the founders have traversed different paths of life and have got different job experiences and have different point of views on many things. Despite this they have come to the same conclusions in terms of knowledge management as well as many other things. This common understanding based on their various experiences and their mutual respect is a guarantee of their ability to seek new and unusual solutions backed up with additional testing and corrections if necessary. This fact is also a guarantee of their cohesive and stable vision for the company.

Both the founders know the environment where people want to share knowledge and to communicate but do not have the appropriate tools as well as an environment where sharing and collaboration could equal suicide They have met people more than willing to share the knowledge/information and people deliberately providing false information with the intent to harm their competing colleagues in the process . Both of them had to solve various ethical dilemmas and were fascinated with the gap between the importance of knowledge (as for value of the company and its relevance in relation to company’s ability to manage) on one side and the under/over estimation of knowledge, waste of resources and a general inability to deal adequately with them on the other.